Science fiction, wrote Darko Suvin in “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” is “the literature of cognitive estrangement”—the genre that arises out of the dialectical encounter between that which is real and that which is imagined, impossible or yet to be.1 The estrangements of science fiction defamiliarize our empirical, everyday reality, motivating through the depiction of radical difference a new and profound rerecognition of our surroundings; cognition acts as estrangement's reality principle, tethering it to what is real, lest it lose all sense and become a mere flight of fancy. Science fiction in this way becomes in Suvin's hands a literature not of anticipation but of analogy; science fiction does not predict the future but rather allegorizes what is already real in the present.
This definition—which firmly situates science fiction as a genre of the political left, as both sub- and supragenre of utopia—remains at the center...
